Outline Of Quotes

“Funny how an absence can feel like a presence, like that space practically glows with her outline and make me notice how she's not here.”

— Joan Steinau Lester

“Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragments. All we could see of each other
all we could see of ourselves
was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.”

— Daryl Gregory

“When you love a man, he becomes more than a body. His physical limbs expand, and his outline recedes, vanishes. He is rich and sweet and right. He is part of the world, the atmosphere, the blue sky and the blue water”

— Gwendolyn Brooks

“The matted straw cover of the latrine was yanked away. The sun blinded me as I looked up at the dark outline of two young soldiers in tattered camouflage, their uniforms made for men bigger than they were. They each held an automatic weapon, an AK-47, and were leering down at me. I could see the two gold teeth of one of them as he grinned.
Gold-tooth reached down and grabbed my hair, yanking me up by it until he could get the other hand under my arm and pull me the rest of the way. I screamed in terror. He pulled me away from the pit as he and the others held their noses and laughed hysterically. One held each arm and dragged me to the river's edge. They tore off my loose cotton dress; I had no underwear on. After howling with laughter and firing guns in the air, they crudely touched my body.”

— Nick Hahn

“Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy-happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love-are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.”

— David Foster Wallace

“Was Hale. He glanced toward Node 3, wondering if the cryptographer were watching. "Fuck it," he grumbled. Below his feet the outline of a recessed trapdoor”

— Dan Brown

“In the middle of the night, I was startled awake by the sharp smell of tequila. My eyes snapped open. The heath bush I'd transplanted from an alley off Divisadero stretched its needled arms over my head. Between the new growth and glowing bell-shaped blossoms, I saw the outline of a man bend over and snap a stem of my helenium. His tequila bottle leaned over as he did, alcohol splashing out of the top and landing on the shrub concealing my body. A girl behind him reached for the bottle. She sat down on the ground with her back to me and tilted her face to the sky.”

— Vanessa Diffenbaugh

“Bones," I sighed. "Know something? I'm not afraid of you, but you scare
me ... ." His outline blurred again.
"You scare me, too, Kitten," he might have replied, but I couldn't be sure.”

— Jeaniene Frost

“When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.”

— Pat Barker

“I never work from an outline, and often I don't know how the story will end.”

— Patricia MacLachlan

“My Templeton is to Cooperstown as a shadow is to the tree that spawned it; an outline that takes texture from the ground it falls on.”

— Lauren Groff

“If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.”

— R.L. Stine

“I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional ... but just a little.”

— Eric Walters

“I start with a beat sheet, which is more of an abbreviated outline. It hits all the major plot points. From there, I move to note cards. But the most important part of my process is my inspiration board.”

— Kami Garcia

“Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“These days it seemed like the words between them were there only to outline the silences.”

— Jodi Picoult

“Writing is a process of discovering. I could never outline a narrative; that just sounds boring. There's no joy of discovery in what you're doing if that's your strategy.”

— Bob Shacochis

“None of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.”

— Anonymous.

“I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.”

— Joyce Maynard

“I like to make an outline or cards and then utterly ignore them.”

— Margaret Stohl

“I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.”

— Jay McInerney

“We propose in the following Treatise to give an outline of the Science which treats of the Nature, the Production, and the Distribution of Wealth. To that Science we give the name of Political Economy.”

— Nassau William Senior

“The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.”

— John Scalzi

“One guy wanted an outline of my foot. Another guy wanted locks of my hair.”

— Nicole Eggert

“And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline. All life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass. Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass.”

— Leo Tolstoy

“Well, I outline fanatically. I am a long thinker and a slow writer, though I am trying to get faster.”

— William Landay

“But then, even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing some one we know" is, to some extent, an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him which we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place. In”

— Marcel Proust

“In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim retraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again(15).”

— Barbara Kingsolver

“THE ARRIVAL Like a tide it comes in, wave after wave of foliage and fruit, the nurtured and the wild, out of the light to this shore. In its extravagance we shape the strenuous outline of enough.”

— Wendell Berry

“No matter how much I admire our schools, I know that no university exists that can provide an education; what a university can provide is an outline, to give the learner a direction and guidance. The rest one has to do for oneself.”

— Louis L’Amour

“I binge write, basically. I do a lot of prep, research, setup. I'll have a pretty detailed outline. Sort of like a beat outline. And then I'll add little notes and dialogue ideas, and I'll just create a 20-page document.”

— Cary Fukunaga

“When I signed onto 'Superman,' editors Matt Idelson and Wil Moss gave me a rough outline that JMS had turned in for the remaining issues of the 'Grounded' arc, which amounted to a couple of sentences for each issue, spelling out in general terms where the issue would take place geographically, specific guest stars, things like that.”

— Chris Roberson

“She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.”

— Ann Brashares

“But
my dear, my heart is BROKEN! I have seen the perfect Peter Wimsey. Height, voice, charm, smile, manner, outline of features, everything
and he is
THE CHAPLAIN OF BALLIOL!! What is the use of anything? ...
I am absolutely shattered by this Balliol business. Such waste
why couldn't he have been an actor?”

— Dorothy L. Sayers

“You want this?" His voice was hoarse.
"Yes," she said. "Do you?"
His finger traced the outline of her mouth. "For this I would have been damned forever. For this I would have given up everything."
She felt the burn behind her eyes, the pressure of tears, and blinked wet eyelashes. "Will ... "
"Dw i'n dy garu di am byth," he said. "I love you. Always." And he moved to cover her body with his own.”

— Cassandra Clare

“It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher's elevated knees.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

“And I think it was the outline of that church tower at Belaugh against the sky which gave me a passion for churches so that every church I've past since I've wanted to stop and look in.”

— John Betjeman

“I've been told that people in the army do more by 7:00 am than I do in an entire day But if I wake at 6:59 am and turn to you to trace the outline of your lips with mine I will have done enough and killed no one in the process.”

— Shane Koyczan

“I write almost purely by instinct. I've never made an outline.”

— Steve Erickson

“The difference between what we see and a sheet of white paper with a few thin lines on it is very great. Yet this abstraction is one which we seem to have adopted almost instinctively at an early stage in our development, not only in Neolithic graffiti but in early Egyptian drawings. And in spite of its abstract character, the outline is responsive to the least tremor of sensibility.”

— Kenneth Clark

“Consider the nematode roundworm, the most abundant of all animals. Four out of five animals on Earth are nematode worms - if all solid materials except nematode worms were to be eliminated, you could still see the ghostly outline of most of it in nematode worms.”

— E. O. Wilson

“Confucius was not so much a philsopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition.”

— Slavoj Žižek

“You know, that's the very least that the American voters can expect is that when you're running for President that you outline what you would do and what you would do differently from this - from the President of the United States.”

— Mitt Romney

“I would also argue that there is a good chance that an outline will help you stave off any onslaught of writer's block. Let me advise you right up front that I am not a big believer in writer's block. I think writer's block is God's way of telling you one of two things - that you failed to think your material through sufficiently before you started writing, or that you need a day or two off with your family and friends.”

— Terry Brooks

“Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp.”

— Thomas A. Edison

“You know, because you outline a movie, it kinda comes at the same time. I mean, there are days when you are just concentrating on 'ok, let's worry about just comedy today,' and there are days when you're like 'you know what, we gotta just beef up the story.'. But, it's not like process wise it's that technically separate. One informs the other, so they kinda all happen together ideally.”

— Todd Phillips

“I don't make outlines or plans because whenever I do, they turn out to be useless. It is as if I am compelled to violate the scope of any outline or plan; it is as if the writing does not want me to know what is about to happen.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

“I think every writer struggles in some way with writers block. The trick is to plan out what you are going to say beforehand. I found out that if you make an outline you're much less likely to get blocked when you get into the middle of the story.”

— Rick Riordan

“Donald Trump refused to outline a health care plan. And they just kind of moved on, instead of pressing him on it. He gave a ridiculous answer on the national debt. And they moved on without pressing him on it.No other candidate could have gotten away with that. So, I think there's a weird bias here in the media rooting for Donald Trump, because they know he's the easiest Republican to beat.”

— Marco Rubio

“We envy others, for we see their lives in broad outline, while forced to live ours in every detail.”

— Robert Breault